How much does Browserless cost?
Browserless uses freemium pricing. There is a free tier with no card required, then paid plans that scale by concurrency and monthly browser-time allowance, with custom enterprise pricing at the top. Plans are billed by units of browser time rather than per request, so cost tracks how long your sessions run. Pricing tiers and limits change, so check the pricing page for current numbers before you budget.
Is Browserless open source?
No, not in the OSI sense. Browserless is source-available under the MongoDB SSPL or a commercial license. The code and Docker image are public, and you can self-host under SSPL for open-source or non-commercial use. Building a proprietary closed-source product on top of it, or running it inside a closed-source system, requires the paid commercial license. If you want a permissively licensed library you can embed freely instead, Playwright is the open option.
Can you self-host Browserless?
Yes. Browserless ships an official Docker image you can run on your own infrastructure or a cloud provider, with support for Puppeteer, Playwright, and REST endpoints plus queueing and timeout controls. Self-hosting is one of its advantages over hosted-only competitors. Mind the licensing: SSPL covers open-source and non-commercial self-hosting, while a proprietary commercial deployment needs a paid commercial license.
What is Browserless best used for?
Browserless is a headless browser platform for scraping JavaScript-rendered pages, generating PDFs, capturing screenshots, and running browser-based tests at scale. It predates the AI agent wave, so its strength is reliable, production-tested browser infrastructure rather than agent features. Teams that want a dependable remote Chrome endpoint behind Puppeteer or Playwright, hosted or self-hosted, are the natural fit. It has also added an MCP server and BrowserQL/Agent APIs for LLM-driven automation, though agent-native platforms like Browserbase go further.
How does Browserless compare to Browserbase?
Both run hosted headless browsers, but they come from different eras. Browserless is the more mature option, with years of production use and a self-hostable Docker image, and it has added agent-oriented tooling such as an MCP server and BrowserQL/Agent APIs. Browserbase was built for the AI agent wave from the start, and its framework integration goes further. Pick Browserless for a stable, optionally self-hosted browser endpoint. Pick Browserbase if you want the more agent-native platform.
What are the best alternatives to Browserless?
The main alternatives are Browserbase, Steel.dev, and Playwright. Browserbase and Steel.dev are hosted browser platforms built for the AI agent era, with abstractions Browserless lacks, so choose them if you need agent infrastructure. Playwright is the open-source automation library you run yourself, which suits teams that want full control and no per-unit billing. Stay with Browserless when you mainly need a reliable, optionally self-hosted headless browser.
